So far, Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance isn’t the cat’s meow, yet he’s fully consistent with Donald Trump’s ridiculous boast of only choosing the best people. Instead of a popularity bump from the Republican National Convention, his poll numbers are down in the dumps. CNN found he is the least liked VP nominee since 1980:
Since 2000, vice-presidential nominees typically have had a net-positive rating immediately following the convention, at plus 19 points. Vance, however, is polling at minus 6 points just one week after accepting the vice-presidential nomination and officially embarking on the campaign trail, the network found.
Not to get catty, but Vance’s buffoonery was put on full display after a video surfaced where he insulted childless women who owned felines, such as Taylor Swift.
“We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
Since a Republican spoke, we must interrupt this column for a quick fact check.
In reality, Harris is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two biological children, Ella and Cole, who refer to the vice president as “Momala.”
In a statement to NBC News, Kerstin Emhoff, Doug’s ex-wife, called Vance’s attacks “baseless,” adding: “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who now has two children, slammed Vance in a CNN interview:
“The really sad thing is, he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
It's also worth noting that having children doesn’t make someone a fit parent or a good person. Vance’s biological father gave him up for adoption when he was in kindergarten. His mother and grandmother told Vance that his dad had been “mean” and abusive. Vance’s mom’s struggles with drug addiction are well-known, so she was hardly a model parent.
Meanwhile, right-wing flamethrower Elon Musk has 12 children, but was a horrible, mostly absent father. Last week, he publicly lied about his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who responded by saying that Musk was “cold” and “he’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.” She said that Musk, “was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high. It was cruel.”
Maybe it’s not the best idea that everybody reproduces? Instead of mindlessly advocating for more parents, our culture should be encouraging better parenting. The goal should be mothers and fathers who are capable of love and affection, who don’t selfishly see acquiring children as trophies to advance their standing in politics or society.
Vance’s attack on childless cat ladies only begins to make sense if one considers his religious conversion to an ultra-right wing Catholicism. He is part of a radical movement that disdains democracy and wants to replace it with a “Red Caesar,” which is basically a strongman with czar-like powers.
I began to connect the dots when Vance’s ignorant and cruel comments were defended by failed 2020 GOP Arizona Senate candidate, Blake Masters. In an X post he said, “Political leaders should have children … Certainly they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters.”
Masters and Vance owe their entire business and political careers to Peter Thiel. He is an eccentric, emotionally challenged, social misfit billionaire from Silicon Valley, who has a penchant for grooming and bankrolling extremist male politicians who want to outlaw his gay marriage.
Weird, right?
In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute Thiel wrote, “The vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In her New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg mentioned that Vance has also gone down an undemocratic rabbit hole, filled with conspiracy cranks who reject democracy:
As Mother Jones reported, Vance recently endorsed a new book called “Unhumans,” co-written by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, which demonizes progressives as nonpeople who must be crushed by extra-democratic means. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” they wrote.
Through this “Alice in Wonderland” lens, one sees the bigger, scarier picture. Vance belongs to a perverse and corrosive movement that wants to create what they deem as “super citizens” — rich, white, property-owning straight men with large families. [Somehow, the ever-delusional Thiel believes these nuts won’t strip his rights, as a gay man, if they secure power. He thinks his money will protect him. It won’t.]
This dangerous crowd is floating the idea of single people being excluded from holding office, because it plays into their hierarchy of citizenship. Once you can prohibit single people, you can begin to question everyone on whether they have enough “skin in the game” to have equal rights. If single cat ladies can’t hold office, the next logical step is to question whether they have the right to vote.
Then you can move on to questioning whether renters are full citizens, because they don’t own property. You could also strip non-business owners of rights because they don’t have enough skin in the economy.
If this is a “Christian Nation” and Trump is a savior, as much of the right-wing cult now believes, they could move on to prohibiting all non-right-wing Christians from voting. Should disabled people be allowed to vote too, or maybe they “should just die,” as Donald Trump said, according to Fred Trump III, the former president’s nephew.
So, the insane comments from Vance, Masters, Thiel and Trump don’t happen in a vacuum. We are talking about powerful men who want to use democracy to destroy it. They have a detailed 900-page plan in place to do so — Project 2025 — if Trump is reelected.
And if they lose the election to a surging Kamala Harris?
This is when these zealots will be at their most dangerous. It's notable that Trump sounds like Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, a tyrant who refuses to give up power. Last week, Maduro said that Venezuela would fall “into a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war” if he didn’t win his rigged bid for “reelection.” This language echoed Trump’s recent bloodbath comments.
At an Ohio rally featuring JD Vance, State Sen. George Lang offered a frightening vision:
"I believe wholeheartedly that Donald Trump and Butler County's J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country, politically. I'm afraid that if we lose this one, it's gonna take a civil war to save this country … if we come down to a civil war I'm glad we have people like ... the Bikers for Trump on our side," pointing to a group of MAGA motorcycle enthusiasts in the audience. Lang then inveighed against liberals he claimed are "chipping away" at our rights, insisting of the American republic, that 2024 is the "last stand to save it!"
Why didn’t Vance immediately denounce Lang from the stage and ban him from all future rallies? Maybe because overthrowing the government, which Trump attempted on January 6, is part of the project?
In 2022, Blake Masters made his twisted views apparent in a campaign ad where he stood in the desert while groping a gun. “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he said. “It wasn’t designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people.”
Such rhetoric is no joke in a nation where some grocery stores sells bullets in vending machines and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reports that, “Calls for ‘civil war’ increased by more than 1,000 percent in the 24 hours after the [Trump] shooting.”
MAGA is not peaceful or democratic, and JD Vance is steeped in a medieval movement that wants to replace the presidency with a king. So, his nasty, invasive comments aren’t only about childbirth or cat ladies, but birthing a new nation where people aren’t created equal. Vance and his crazy-rich clique want a New America, where they sit high atop a gilded pedestal in judgment of who is and isn’t worthy of full citizenship. If you aren’t exactly like them, you don’t get to pass through the velvet rope of autocracy.
Fortunately, there is a way to stop this madness from becoming reality. Vote for Kamala Harris and support whatever measures are necessary to put down a possible insurrection from disgruntled MAGA goons who won’t accept defeat at the ballot box.
As Harris pointed out in her first campaign ad, featuring a song from Beyoncé, and her appearance on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” this election truly is about preserving freedom for everyone, including single cat ladies.
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Wayne Besen is the executive director of Delray Beach-based LGBTQ nonprofit organization Truth Wins Out. He is the former spokesperson of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization.
